Plans that come to naught but look like action

By Michael Duffy

1 March 2008 — 11:00am

Events of the past week make you wonder about the purpose of state government planning. Is it done to lead NSW into a carefully considered and glorious future? Or is it just a screen behind which ministers can do anything they damn well like?

If government was serious about its plans, it would follow them. But in a surprising number of cases it doesn't.

I first became aware of this when I worked in the Office of Public Management in the NSW Premier's Department many years ago, and had to review the strategic IT plans for a dozen government agencies.

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Most had plans, compiled by consultants at a considerable cost. They were lovely plans. The only problem was that most of them had been ignored. As far as I could see, their only outcome was to enable government chief executive officers to give large amounts of money to planning experts in the private sector.

The same applies to other plans created by government. Anyone who's tried to follow the history of planning for Sydney knows how little has been achieved. Take the plans for releasing more land for building houses.

A few weeks ago I called an informed bureaucrat to ask when the most recent plan might finally be implemented, by which I meant when a start would be made to build the first house. "How long's a piece of string?" was the cheerful answer.

This week Linton Besser reported in the Herald that the State Government had decided to ditch its Metropolitan Rail Expansion Plan (2005) and was considering abandoning elements of its Urban Transport Statement (2006). Apparently, a few years is a long time in the world of strategic urban planning.

Or consider water planning. For years the Government was hounded by a private company named Sydney Services, which wanted to buy a lot of the city's waste water and recycle it. Naturally the Government did everything it could to resist this ridiculous proposition, but it was finally forced by the (federal) courts to enter into negotiations with Sydney Services. So what did it do? Why, it announced it would build a massive desalination plant, which would flood the market with highly subsidised water - and make large-scale recycling uncommercial.

This took Sydney Services completely by surprise. The company had been foolish enough to believe the Government's Metropolitan Water Plan, which said a desal plant would not be built unless dam levels fell below 30 per cent. It had guessed - correctly - that water levels would not fall this low.

Sydney Services may well have interpreted the decision to build a desal plant as an indication the Government would do anything it took to destroy the company. It closed down, thereby ending the terrible threat that Sydney might recycle a substantial proportion of its waste water.

It was a splendid victory, for pollution, monopoly and the $100 million-plus dividend the Government takes from Sydney Water each year. But not, you'd have to say, for our faith in government planning as represented by the Metropolitan Water Plan.

So what is the purpose of government planning, if not to enable the attaining of publicly desirable objectives? Well, even failed plans provide plenty of benefits for politicians. Let us consider the ways.

Most importantly, they create the illusion of action. A plan enables government to answer critics with the claim that while things might be crook, help is on the way. (See housing plan referred to above.) This is why governments these days have a plan for just about everything. If they don't have a plan, you can bet they're working on one.

It's just that the plans are rarely implemented. An expert in recycling told me that 95 per cent of local councils' recycling tenders are never let.

Now, these tenders are often the outcome of plans to deal with waste that have taken years to develop. For those years, councils have been able to use the plans to deflect criticism from environmentalists that they're not doing enough recycling. But when the time comes for action, the plan is abandoned, often to be replaced by another plan - or, more precisely, another long planning process. (In the article on the junking of the Metropolitan Rail Expansion Plan referred to above, Linton Besser noted "many years of [more] planning" would now be required. We'd expect nothing less of this Government. Good planning takes time.)

Another advantage of plans and planning is that they give politicians and their bureaucrats the opportunity to exercise power and patronage, and to extract political donations and other bribes from the poor suckers dependent on their decisions. They do this by inserting government decisions into the workings of the free market, often quite unnecessarily.

It would be nice to think society might learn something from the continuing failure of planning. But, somewhat oddly, people continue to respond to one failed plan by calling for another. If you look closely, you'll often find the purpose of the next plan is to - try to - fix up the disasters created by the last one.

Ambitious planning is like communism. In theory it ought to work, and the world would be a better place if it did. In practice, the people who benefit from it most are two of the most dangerous types of human being, the gangster and the idealist. Neither is unknown among politicians and their bureaucrats.